Anonymous

For this
year’s Good Friday montage, I selected some early music for which it is
difficult to attribute the authorship.

Anonymous
works are works of
art or literature, that have an anonymous, undisclosed, or unknown creator or
author. In the case
of very old works, the author's name may simply be lost over the course of
history and time. In such cases the author is often referred to as Anonymus,
the Latin form of "anonymous". In other cases, the creator's name is
intentionally kept secret. The author's reasons may vary from fear of
persecution to protection of his or her reputation. For the most part, works
attributed to Anonymus pre-date the Baroque era, and can be thought of as being
passed down following “oral” tradition.

This is the
case for the collection of titles that make up today’s montage. As I have
provided many - shall I say - austere montages in past years appropriate for
the Lenten season, I avoided gloomy works in this collection, though a few are
spiritual or religious in nature.

Not all
titles are “Anonymous” – in my defense, when I started assembling this
playlist, all the titles were of unknown authorship. Over time, I managed to
unmask the composer but – with your indulgence – kept them in the montage, as
they are of similar tradition to the others.